The Nabob eBook

He pointed out the difficulty of keeping an act of
this importance secret. Then he shut himself
up in a malignant silence, full of cold anger and
violent determinations. The death of the duke,
the fall of an absurd vanity, had struck a final blow
at the household; for disaster, which often brings
hearts ready to understand one another nearer, finishes
and completes disunions. And it was indeed a disaster.
The popularity of the Jenkins pearls suddenly stopped,
the situation of the foreign doctor and charlatan,
ably defined by Bouchereau in the Journal of the Academy,
and people of fashion looked at each other in fright,
paler from terror than from the arsenic they had imbibed.
Already the Irishman had felt the effect of those
counter blasts which make Parisian infatuations so
dangerous.

It was for that reason, no doubt, that Jenkins had
judged it wise to disappear for some time, leaving
madame to continue to frequent the houses still open
to them, to gauge and hold public opinion in respect.
It was a hard task for the poor woman, who found everywhere
the cool and distant welcome which she had received
at the Hemerlingues. But she did not complain;
thus earning her marriage, she was putting between
them as a last resource the sad tie of pity and common
trials. And as she knew that she was welcomed
in the world on account of her talent, of the artistic
distraction she lent to their private parties, she
was always ready to lay on the piano her fan and long
gloves, to play some fragment of her vast repertory.
She worked constantly, passing her afternoons in turning
over new music, choosing by preference sad and complicated
harmonies, the modern music which no longer contents
itself with being an art, but becomes a science, and
answers better to our nerves, to our restlessness,
than to sentiment.

Daylight flooded the room as a maid brought a card
to her mistress; “Heurteux, business agent.”

The gentleman was there, he insisted on seeing madame.

“You have told him the doctor is travelling?”

He had been told, but it was to madame he wished to
speak.

“To me?”

Disturbed, she examined this rough, crumpled card,
this unknown name: “Heurteux.”
What could it be?

“Well, show him in.”

Heurteux, business agent, coming from broad daylight
into the semi-obscurity of the room, was blinking
with an uncertain air, trying to see. She, on
the other hand, saw very distinctly a stiff figure,
with iron-gray whiskers and protruding jaw, one of
those hangers-on of the law whom one meets round the
law courts, born fifty years old, with a bitter mouth,
an envious air, and a morocco portfolio under the arm.
He sat down on the edge of the chair which she pointed
out to him, turned his head to make sure that the
servant had gone out, then opened his portfolio methodically
to search for a paper. Seeing that he did not
speak, she began in a tone of impatience: